Friday, March 14, 2014

Say it agian?

So I'm trying something really new this time.


I was in the store, and I noticed that the Dragon speaking software for only like $30, which also came with a microphone set. 

In the past, dictation software, while out of my price range, has been appealing to me for a few reasons:

  • I have a few learning disabilities that drastically slow down my output and technology has been a big help in the past.
  •  I've always noticed for my personal writing has two phases.
  • A crazy creative phrase where I'm pacing back and forth on on the floor thinking about my story and what's happening next. Sometimes I ramble to myself or repeat lines of dialogue to get an ear for how it sounds. It's when I seem to be my most imaginative. Call it my right brain jazz.
  •  But then I'd sit down in my brain seems to stop when I have to meet with my fingers to type. Call it my left brain OCD.

I've also been trying to go for a new method where my first draft is all rough output to be corrected later as I go through Draft 2, Draft 3, Draft 4, etc. But I getting too distracted by all the wiggly red lines under the poor spellings, the bad grammar, etc. Distraction Free Writing Software used to help with this but then I discovered that most of the free versions of this sort of app let you get back to the Internet with Alt-Tab.
Oh Internet, you cruel, cruel mistress. Why must you tempt me so. But apparently, it's harder to be tempted by Io9,com  when you're pacing the floor and talking to yourself like you're used to having padded walls.  (Man, I need to get a longer cord for this microphone.) 

So I decided to grab the Dragon software and see what would happen. Now I admit I'm keeping my expectations are very very low. As long as the software can dictate my long run-on sentences with some accuracy so I can get back to tweaking them later with silly things like punctuation or the correct homophones, then we'll be walking in the right direction. 

It's going to be long road before I get this thing to do a better draft than that. Thanks to my hours of voice to text over my phone, it doesn't sound so weird to say "period" at the end of sentence, but anything more than that kills my focus right now.

At first blush, seeing as how using this setup on Day 1 got me almost 1000 words for my novel in an hour, I'd have to say that it was worth $30.

Side note: The first draft of this article was written totally in Dragon speaking software. There were changes, trust me.

Thursday, March 6, 2014

World building: Painting on a big blue marble

There's a lively debate going on when extraneous world building crosses the line. For a lot of writers, the process of creating the world is trial and error. So it's not clear in the first draft what's an additional details that you'll eventually have to cut. And when do those snippets go from from being a safety net to mentally chasing your tail.

The wildly imaginative and wildly talented China MiĆ©ville has said that you should only come up with details that enhance your story (though his earlier breakout, Perdido Street Station, went past that bar a couple of times) and that if you find yourself creating a whole separate novel as a gazetteer, then perhaps that’s more your thing.

Zelazny  and his Chronicles of Amber were a big influence during my college days. Even though he wrote in a tight, noir style, he created universes made from scratch. Sometimes those details became relevant to the plot and other times it was just create a sense of how varied the multiverse can be.

Zelazny’s worlds felt lived in yet, I get a vibe that Zelazny did a lot of world building by the seat of his pants. I’m sure that a lot more world building got left on the cutting room floor, but there are still plenty of back story hinted that made one feel as if Amber had existed before you opened the book and that it would still be there even after you finished the story. He had no fear in putting things that turned out to be red herrings and  intriguing back stories.

Of course, he wrote his books in a different time. With every thing living forever on the Internets, where fans can comb and cross reference every bit, I think that stifles authors a bit these days and some might fear that every bit and bobble has to be accounted for.

A pitch perfect example of this has been Star Trek. Twice the creative teams felt that they needed an out (Temporal Cold Wars and Alternate Realities) to "reset" over 40 years of canon to get the elbow room to tell new stories to both old -- and new -- fans. 

I'm pretty sure that a lot of fans disagree with that, but when it happens twice, what does that say? Sure there are fan-creators out there who mine the old material to make some great amateur films that have set a new bar, but those aren't coming out at real pace to match a TV show. And in the end, they only have to please themselves.

And that's usually the fan I identify with more, not the type to nitpick on the details, but to use their own imagination to fill in the gaps with their own stories. That's the place where fan fiction and fan art began in that time when it took months to wait for the next book or movie. A time where if we wanted more and couldn't wait, we made it up as we went along. 

I don't mind admitting it, that's where I started too.


Wednesday, March 5, 2014

And now this cute little owl



I enjoyed South Florida's Ren Faire and this little fellow was part of a falconry exhibit.

This fair was not as fun as they had been in the past, though, because of two reasons.

My long-time friend who volunteered for Ren Faire every year moved away. I missed her and getting to hang out with the "Players." Didn't feel the same this time.

They changed the layout so you must walk past a good chunk of the vendor booths and the food court before getting to most of the shows and ... more vendor booths. I'm going to browse through it all anyway, I'd like to take in a show or two first, thank you.


Still fun, just tiny bit of bittersweet (about the size of this owl) sprinkled in for flavor.